Wendy Warren: The Carceral Colony—The Role of Imprisonment in Early North America

The rise of the U.S. carceral state is one of the defining features of our 21st century society. This talk will describe the long history of prisons in North America, from seventeenth century forward, describing both the experience of imprisonment in the colonial period and how colonial authorities used imprisonment. This information has been largely erased in scholarship on American prisons, which usually begin with the birth of the penitentiary in post-Revolutionary America. Prof. Wendy Warren will examine linkages between colonization and imprisonment, and connections between incarceration today and incarceration in the past.

Wendy Warren is a professor of History at Princeton University, specializing in colonization of North America and the Caribbean. She has particular interests in slavery, sexuality, and incarceration. She received her PhD from Yale University. Her first book, New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She is currently writing The Carceral Colony, an exploration of the role of prisons in the colonization of 17th- and 18th-century North America.

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PLEASE NOTE: The event will be on Zoom. Event link is sent 30 minutes before program start.